One of the brow-raising revelations of the week was that white evangelicals largely voted for a thrice-married secularist over a Bible-thumping son of a pastor in both South Carolina and Nevada, breaking with Iowa evangelicals who delivered the Hawkeye State to Ted Cruz.
[Cruz] carried only 27 percent of the white born-again and evangelical Christian vote, behind Trump’s 41 percent. Cruz also lost this group in New Hampshire and South Carolina.
One could chalk this up to the universally despised character of Ted Cruz. But since those evangelical voters flocked in greater numbers to Donald Trump than they did to Cruz’s political twin Marco Rubio, who is also vocal about his Christianity, there’s clearly something greater at work.
The first thing to understand is that self-identified evangelicals aren’t a monolith, with some being more devout in their worship and others simply identifying as evangelical even though they’re far less observant. Last month, the Wall Street Journal found that among people who attended church on a weekly basis, 56 percent supported Cruz, while 38 percent supported Trump.
But part of Trump’s broader evangelical appeal can also be explained by Matthew MacWilliams’ research on the sole factor that makes voters more likely to support Trump: Their penchant for authoritarianism. MacWilliams found that a voter’s gender, education, age, ideology, party identification, income, and race didn’t have any predictive value in whether they were Trump supporters, but their authoritarian worldview did.
When political scientists use the term authoritarianism, we are not talking about dictatorships but about a worldview. People who score high on the authoritarian scale value conformity and order, protect social norms, and are wary of outsiders. And when authoritarians feel threatened, they support aggressive leaders and policies.
While not all adherents to authoritarianism are evangelicals, it’s certainly easy to see how that description jibes nicely with the mindset of many God-fearing Christians.
But a piece by Federalist publisher Ben Domenech really zeroed in on why evangelicals are so irresistibly drawn to Trump, and you may not be surprised to find that it’s because they appreciate his bigotry.
Domenech explained that southern evangelicals are now facing what they deem to be a “post-apocalyptic environment” where their world has been upended with an “explosion of controversy over political correctness.”
He tagged this to the legalization of same-sex marriage, the government mandating that certain religious organizations cover contraception, and Planned Parenthood’s continued funding from taxpayer dollars. But to his point about political correctness, imagine what social conservatives must have thought when the Susan G. Komen Foundation suffered a $77 million setback and overall loss of goodwill after news surfaced that it stopped funding Planned Parenthood under pressure from anti-abortion activists.
In short, the more average Americans know about the agenda of social conservatives, the less popular that agenda becomes. And social conservatives are increasingly shocked to find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion they once viewed as an ally.
But the most cataclysmic and profound of those changes, even since the last presidential election cycle in 2012, is clearly the arrival of marriage equality. Robert Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas (who recently compared the Catholic Church to Satan), told NPR this week that the onset of the freedom to marry had made evangelicals ripe for a Trump candidacy.
“I think the same-sex marriage ruling by the Supreme Court last June was a watershed moment for evangelical Christians. I think in a strange way, that same-sex marriage ruling actually made evangelicals more open to a secular candidate like Donald Trump…”
Jeffress went on to explain that many evangelicals feel they can “no longer depend upon government to uphold traditional biblical values,” so there’s no need to have a strong spiritual presence in the White House if that person is only charged with solving issues related to the economy and national security.
But I think Domenech had a much better explanation for the born-again Trump believer.
He is not one of them—they know that. But they believe he is for them at a time when their faith and beliefs have become politically incorrect. They know he doesn’t care if he’s called a bigot, and that is a very powerful thing in today’s political fray. They don’t care if he’s a good person—they care that he’s a warrior for everything at odds with the elite opinion of the day… which now includes them.
Donald Trump has become the life raft evangelicals are clinging to, lest the tsunami of social change pull them under—a torrent caused by the onset of marriage equality. He legitimizes their disdain for changing social attitudes and demonstrates that bigotry is still a winner, even in today’s environment. And they will follow him at any cost, rather than look in the mirror to find their views are as bigoted as a new generation of fair-minded Americans are proving them to be.
